Sam Lampert just told me about fivethirtyeight.com which is frankly awesome – model-based seat estimates (generally more reliable than polls) with cool graphics. Trust the americans to cover our election better than we can.

If it is this tight the regional parties (Scottish and Welsh nationalists) are really going to come into play.

Results are also in from the Give Your Vote project – UK voters have pledged their votes to people from Afganistan, Bangladesh and Ghana.

"The Conservative Party is, by the law of its constitution, necessarily the stupidest party. I do not retract that assertion... stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it."

The next 4 years are going to suck. But with any luck, the massive cuts will make everyone hate tories again, and there will be a wonderful Lib/Lab coalition in 2014 with proportional representation and House of Lords reform and rules against going into stupid wars and a truly social liberal progressive domestic agenda that is fiscally responsible and “coherence between UK development, trade, investment, migration and agriculture policies.”

4 comments:

Excellent round up. I got a very cut/paste response from Harriet Harman regarding international development and aid:

"Labour will maintain a concerted push to meet the Millennium Development Goals (8 internationally agreed goals that aim to combat extreme poverty across the world) by 2015 - reducing poverty, tackling diseases, putting children into school and fighting the inequalities faced by women. By keeping the pressure up for reforms of international institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank so they are more effective and more representative of the developing world, we can help push forward sustainable development."

You have one post showing no difference in tax and spend policies [truly social liberal progressive domestic agenda that is fiscally responsible], it was the Libs who went into the latest "stupid wars" and have had more than a dozen years to effect the changes you want to see without producing them, but imagine that policies are suddenly going to go to purgatory only to be snatched away to an unknown sensibility after 4 years in the doghouse? Curiouser and curiouser.

It was Labour not the liberals who went into the stupid war. My current view is that Labour's heart is in the right place but they have probably spent a bit too much, are probably still a bit too anti-market in many quarters, and are a bit too cavalier with civil liberties. The Liberals would be a nice sensible moderating influence (as they will hopefully now also be to the Conservatives).

British politics still has something of a class-war element. I'd like to think that the liberals rise above it more than the others.

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"Because the consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else." (Lucas 1988, On the Mechanics of Economic Development)

"The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it" (Marx 1888)

Roving Bandit is a reference to Mancur Olson, not because I think I'm some kind of badass.

"represent the material embodiment of market discourses that run through the capillary structures of orgs that conform contemporary neoliberal ed policy" -- Education International